Facebook Friends suggest is getting creepy | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Friends suggest is getting creepy

4 pointsaitoehigie9 comments

I met someone in the course of work this week. He didnt have a mobile phone with him and I use a dumb phone thats not even connected to the Internet. Surprise, I just logged into Facebook and saw his name on my Friends suggest list. How is that even possible? This is not the first time something like this has happened to me. Can anyone please enlighten my ignorance about how Facebook does this?

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Just guessing:

Let's call you X.

My guess is that you X have a facebbok friend Y, and that Y has a facebook friend Z. So facebook can make a link between X and Z.

Option 1) Someone tagged X and Z (and perhaps Y) in a recent photo, so facebook decided to add Z to the suggestions of X.

Option 2) Facebooks was already showing Z randomly in the suggestions of X because they are linked. But since X doesn't know Z then X doesn't notice Z and just ignore Z. Now that X knows Z, then X recognizes the photograph in the suggestions.

I dont think thats what happened. This person in question is a totally random person (actually a walk in customer I attended to) so I doubt if anyone went around tagging pictures of us together

That increase the creepy factor. Perhaps this person friended the business or a coworker???

No. Thats why I said its creepy. Almost like black magic.

Before you met this person, did you schedule anything in your calendar or something similar?

Edit:

Also, were there any other devices there? GPS? Video cameras? Microphones?

None at all. I use a dumb phone, the person in question didnt have a phone with him

There's something we're missing here. Not sure what.

Facebook uses facial recognition... they may not require that someone tag the photo for them to know who's in it. I just assume that every face in every photo uploaded there is turned into a shadow profile which is is being constantly updated with correlations, regardless of whether or not any of that data is public or directly supplied by users.

The fact that they appeared in your suggested friends list probably means there's some overlapping set of interests somewhere, and maybe a friend of a friend in common, even if the the timing itself might be coincidence.

Would it be possible that he googled you, or you googled him after the meeting, that one of you searched for the others' LinkedIn or other similar sites (or on FB itself), and that the Facebook cookies/trackers connected the two of you?

Disclaimer: I am not connected to the tech world professionally; I'm just a bystander.

Step 1. Read Data and Goliath by Bruce Schneier. Step 2. Delete your Facebook account.

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